School of Music

Desert Island Discs, Beti a'i Phobol, and Britishness

This week Dr Sarah Hill is joining musicologists, sociologists and media scholars to reflect on the historical and contextual significance of Desert Island Discs, the BBC radio programme that has been running continuously since 1942.

Dr Hill will be presenting a paper on ‘Desert Island Discs, Beti a’i Phobol, and Britishness’ during the session on Contexts, Histories and Parallels. Beti a’i Phobol, a fixture on Radio Cymru since 1987, takes a more relaxed approach than Desert Island Discs: guests are allowed four musical choices and much more time for converstion.

Dr Hill said: “My paper considers Beti’s roster of guests, their musical choices, and the impact that language has had on their presentation of subjective and cultural identity. I will then shift focus to those guests of Beti a’i Phobol who have ‘crossed over’ to Desert Island Discs, and gauge the changing sense of Welshness over the programme’s history, and the concomitant sense of Wales within British culture.”